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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Even
though there are a number of persistent questions regarding the aims,
constituency, and longevity of the Religious Right in America, most historians and political scientists agree on at least one thing—its emergence
in the 1960s marked a change in the way conservative religious Protestants or
fundamentalists, especially in the South, engaged the political sphere. And
without question, the surge of religiously-motivated,
theologically-conservative voters who supported Goldwater’s presidential run or
were part of the calculus in Nixon’s “southern strategy” marked a notable shift
in national voting alignments. As historians such as George Marsden and Joel
Carpenter and political scientists such as Michael Lienesch have pointed out,
we can, however, overstate the novelty of the Religious Right. Conservative
Protestants, even fundamentalists, had been politically active as a movement in
the earlier part of the twentieth century; in many ways, then, the emergence of
the Religious Right marked a recovery of older patterns of political behavior
or, as Lienesch argues, one more in a long cycle of Protestant hand wringing
and subsequent moral crusading. But while these scholars call our attention to
the William Jennings Bryans of the early twentieth century, the notion persists
that, in the American South, at least, the Religious Right’s eruption in the
most religious region in the nation was indeed something unprecedented. We
certainly know how reticent southerners were to join various political-moral
crusades of the early nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century
the malaise of “solid south” voting patterns had no doubt settled in—part of
which meant that white southerners, regardless of religious preferences, simply
acquiesced to the political status quo of Democratic white supremacy, at least
until the 1960s.

Given
these assumptions, events surrounding the election of 1892 in North Carolina
seem far from normal—or were
they? The election of 1892 saw perhaps the most powerful third-party movement
in the nation’s history—the People’s or Populist Party—emerge as a national contender that
consolidated workers and farmers across the nation. For a time, Populists
threatened to overturn political convention and in particular white Democratic
dominance in the South, all with the sense that they were acting in accord with
the will of God. As they entered the political fray, the Populists of North
Carolina demolished any purported wall between church and state. One religious
paper, for example, in 1892 noted that many good Christians were “ready to
consign to eternal punishment all who do not agree with them both in religion
and politics. We heard a very good man consign a certain political party to
hell and every man who voted for its nominees” (North Carolina Baptist,
26 October 1892). Moreover, Populists expressed absolute conviction that they
were fighting on God’s side. One Populist warned: “There can be but two
political parties to claim the suffrage of the people, the one having truth,
justice and right on its side; the other the love of money, office and corruption....With
God for the acknowledged leader of the former and the devil for the latter, all
good people ought to know which will win” (Progressive Farmer,
10 May 1892, 17 October 1893). Populists often considered it a sin even to
affiliate with another political party. One wondered how anybody “professing to
be a Christian can vote the Democratic ticket”; another wrote that the
Democrats represented “the abomination of desolation” and were “stenches in the
nostrils of decent people”—a party crying “lustily to Baal.” Still others
accused Democrats of “idolatry,” “harlotry,” “heathenism,” “iniquity,” of being
the “whore of Babylon” and “of the Devil” (Hickory Mercury,
6 April 1892; Farmers’
Advocate, 24 August 1892).

These
Populists, then, invite us to consider how conservative religion, in this case
North Carolina evangelicalism, could galvanize such a radical political
movement. Even though, as with the case of fundamentalism more broadly, many
historians of southern religion have demonstrated that nineteenth-century
southerners often mixed religion and politics, we still usually imagine
theologically conservative southerners prior to the late 1960s as captive to
the prevailing southern cultural ideals, willingly submitting to the “powers
that be.” While such a view is not entirely mistaken, as we can see with these
North Carolina Populists, it misrepresents the historical record with regard to
all southern evangelicals. Moreover such a view rests on the dubious inference
that conservative religion—traditionalist beliefs, institutions, and practices
entrenched in a particular place—must invariably reinforce that status quo.
North Carolina Populists demonstrate otherwise, for even though not every
Populist was an evangelical (and vice
versa), conservative
evangelicalism shaped the Populists’ understanding of themselves and their
movement as they wove their political and economic reforms into a grand cosmic
narrative pitting the forces of God and freedom against those of Satan and
tyranny. This narrative gave the movement an apocalyptic sense of urgency and
in the process challenged the very southern sacred canopy that gave it birth.

Central
to the Populists’ sense of urgency was their belief that the economic hard
times, political corruption in the two old parties, and even the drift towards
centralization among a number of Protestant denominations in the 1890s signaled
a crisis in American democracy or “freedom.” For Populists, freedom meant
economic independence on a personal level, laissez faire capitalism in the
political sphere, freedom of conscience in politics and religion, and the
absence of concentrations of population, wealth, and power—either in politics
or the church. In their minds, the loss of freedom in any one sphere—economic,
political, or religious—eventually would poison Christian civilization in America, leading to a victory for Satan and his minions.

Again,
this narrative had such power because the ideals upon which it drew were so
central to the religious beliefs entrenched in the region. Yet, because these
religious beliefs were so embedded in southern culture, they also complicate
the story, for conservative evangelicalism shaped not only Populism but
opposition to it as well. Nineteenth-century evangelicalism displayed both countercultural
and conservative tendencies. Evangelicals’ egalitarian, anti-elitist, and
liberal strains helped engender Populism’s assault on the southern economic and
political “powers that be,” but for many southerners, evangelicalism also
sacralized political, economic, and cultural power. It led some evangelicals,
usually white Democrats, to reject and ultimately quash the People’s Party as
it threatened their hegemony. Even though the issue of race was deeply woven
into this conflict over the sacred in southern culture, the volatility of
southern politics in the 1890s and, in particular, the vehemence with which
Populists and non-Populists did battle, reflected both sides’ alignment along
this central fissure within an evangelicalism that informed basic southern
understandings of politics, economics, and society. In other words, because
evangelicalism so deeply molded southern ideals and ways, it was able to propel
such a powerful movement of social change and such an equally forceful backlash
against that change.

To
make some sense of this conflict, the focus here, however, will fall on the
religious presuppositions that shaped the Populists’ response to the economic,
religious, and political problems they witnessed in the 1890s. What
distinguished a Populist in 1892 from her Democratic neighbor down the road was
a deep sense that the divine experiment begun in 1776 was failing and at fault
were the hell-bound political parties that had failed to embody and protect
American freedom. Redemption therefore required a new party that could restore
those sacred ideals of freedom.

The
Populists’ mixture of religion and politics drew on a long theological heritage
concerning the relationship of church to state and more broadly about the
nature of personal and political freedom. These patterns of thought derived
from the evangelicalism that had become thoroughly established in the South by
the late nineteenth century—so much so that religious life in North Carolina
was in many ways akin to Puritan New England or Mormon Utah; evangelicalism was
an inescapable presence.

As
historians such as Charles Reagan Wilson and Donald Mathews have demonstrated,
by having achieved such a central place in southern culture, evangelicalism
stabilized or legitimated many elements of postbellum southern society; hence,
the idea that the southern evangelicals were “captive” to predominant cultural
mores is not without merit. Yet, evangelicals’ egalitarianism, values of
justice and equality, and stress on individual conscience almost always
complicated their relationship to their prevailing culture. Even the most
socially conservative evangelicals often felt uneasy about an outlook that
seemed elitist.

Evangelicals’
beliefs interacted with commonsense understandings of human beings and
institutions that were widely-held in nineteenth century America. This commonsense way of perceiving the world—based on Scottish Common Sense
philosophy—stressed the ability of all people to apprehend and conform to
certain axioms, ideals, or “principles” by which God ruled heaven and earth.
Evangelicals, in other words, imagined a world of oughts—things ought to be
according to God’s static or axiomatic principles—and all people could or ought
to understand and conform to these principles. Furthermore, most evangelicals
linked this way of thinking to the idea of “God’s moral governance”—the idea
that, since acting according to godly principles produced right behavior, if
all members of a society acted rightly, that society experienced the “moral
governance” of God, or more simply put, was in line with the way things ought
to be.

By
the late nineteenth century, commonsense thinking, in various degrees of
sophistication, along with this notion of God’s moral governance, was well
established in the southern evangelical mind and engendered a number of often
contradictory intellectual and social trajectories. On the one hand, this
outlook stressed conformity to absolute rules—an idea that could support relationships
of power or social control, including oppressive ones. Evangelicalism in the
late nineteenth century helped mythologize the Old South and undergirded
conservative gender relations, and its ambivalence on vindictive justice and
penchant for sacralizing hierarchies of race created an environment hospitable
for lynching, Jim Crow, and black disfranchisement. This was especially evident
in matters of race, gender, and sometimes class.

On
the other hand, commonsense thinking also had egalitarian implications. These
egalitarian strains in commonsense thinking, and evangelicals’ more general
egalitarian tendencies, stemmed from their insistence that an individualistic
conversion experience—a radically personal sense of knowing one belonged to God—was
essential to salvation. Specifically, most evangelicals believed that all
people were equal before God in a state of sin and likewise that all people
could apprehend the divine without the mediation of priest or church. On the
egalitarian side, for example, it stressed the innate “common” ability of all
people to think and act morally regardless of social class, race, or gender.
Drawing on this egalitarian, individualistic impulse (which was often combined
with a strong anti-elitism), evangelicals insisted that an individual believer,
armed with a sanctified conscience, could read the Bible, develop ethical and
theological positions, and deliberate such matters without political,
ecclesiastical, or in some cases creedal coercion. One Baptist insisted along
that his denomination was “democratic” and bred “independence” because “the
Baptist reads the Bible for himself and teaches his children to do likewise” (North Carolina Baptist, 17 February 1892).

This
tension between conformity and conscience indelibly shaped evangelical
political and social thought. Again, evangelicals believed that when Christians
acted according to their converted consciences, their obedience to religious,
economic, or political truth put them in harmony with God’s governance which
insured a well-ordered society. Thus, they traditionally voiced opposition to
the twin evils of ignorance and political coercion that could bind the
conscience and thus thwart God’s governance. This emphasis on freedom of
conscience was at the heart of Protestants’ assaults on Papal hierarchy, for
example, and after it became politicized in the eighteenth century, this belief
undergirded evangelical attacks on religious establishment and furthermore
supported liberal ideals of toleration and especially republicanism or
democracy. Evangelicals often further bolstered their support for the verity of
democratic governance by pointing to the contradiction between hierarchical
patterns of governance and the egalitarianism they saw as implicit in the
command to love one another.

This
stress on individual autonomy, especially as it combined with American
democratic political thought, caused southern evangelicals by the late
nineteenth century to think of themselves as historical champions of freedom of
conscience and religious toleration, believing furthermore that religious
liberty established a foundation for democratic government more generally. Most
southern evangelicals believed, for example, that the vote was the voice of the
conscience that in turn reflected the voice of God—vox populi, vox dei. They moreover considered religious
liberty and their voluntary ecclesiastical institutions as tutors for civil
liberty, for reliance on one’s conscience in religious matters, they believed,
led to a general independence about the things of life, meaning one could cast
a vote or serve one’s government independent of the suasion of party favors,
greed, or self-interest.

While
advocating the verity of democracy in church and state generally,
nineteenth-century evangelicals usually stressed the particular importance of
American democracy in God’s providential designs. Undergirding the idea that
their denominations were central to American democracy was the notion that God
had special designs for America as the beacon of democracy to the world—that America was Winthrop’s city on a hill, the culmination of all that was good in western Christian
civilization. This idea permeated southern evangelicals’ speech. Disciple of
Christ Miss Mattie Ham wrote that, because it had resisted British tyranny,
“the American government more fully embodies the principles of Christianity
than any other political system on the globe” (Watch Tower,
7 June 1901).

In
proclaiming the verity of democracy and especially the sacred mission of the United States, how might evangelicals react if it appeared that American democracy was in
peril? Here, we need again to go back to their commonsense patterns of thinking
to understand their unique restorationist view of reform. Evangelicals argued
that human beings and institutions were sacred—a part of God’s moral governance
or in line with the way things ought to be—only insofar as they embodied God’s eternal principles. For human beings, the embodiment
of these ideals commenced at conversion and grew as one reached true Christian
manhood and womanhood, which meant exhibiting a fully integrated belief system
rooted in an independent conscience—in other words, having the “backbone” or
“courage” to act in accordance with one’s conscience—one’s internalized,
eternal principles and hence in accord with God’s moral governance.

As
with grown men and women, institutions of civil and ecclesiastical government
were considered sacred only if these institutions—or, more specifically, their
members—embodied God’s eternal principles. We can see this way of thinking in
evangelical ecclesiology, for most evangelicals believed that their
denominational organizations were subject to the voice of their members, who,
by embodying God’s principles, spoke the voice of God—the institutions
themselves were not sacred. Most moreover believed that ecclesiastical
governing bodies—or any concentrated group of leaders—posed an inherent threat
to autonomy or liberty. Even their churches, like all governing structures, were
prone to centralization and therefore to “tyranny” and the loss of God’s
governance. As many southern evangelicals looked out over the ecclesiastical
horizon by the 1890s, they saw just such a state of centralized ecclesiastical
and even political tyranny emerging.

While
almost all evangelicals agreed that political parties, like ecclesiastical
bodies, existed solely to express God’s principles as revealed by the vote or
participation of a God-breathed conscience, their thinking became much more
complex when applied to the actual temporal relationship of the church to the
state.

Two
contentious ideas informed the practical dimensions of Church/State relations—contentious
ideas that reflected the conservative and countercultural tensions we already
have seen. On the conservative side, many southern evangelicals articulated the
doctrine often referred to as the “spirituality of the church” that relegated
to the state all power in the political sphere and to the church all authority
in the moral or “spiritual” sphere. Many also adhered to more vague ruminations
about “the separation of church and the state.” From a commonsense view of
obedience to the “powers that be,” other evangelicals simply thought politics
was best left alone, and, as was usually the case, “leaving it alone” meant
acquiescence to the status quo. Some expressed a fear going back to Roger
Williams, that where the state and church mix, the state corrupts the church.

On
the more activist side, many southern evangelicals instead looked to eternal
axioms to judge the status of society in terms of what it should be. And many evangelicals were, in fact, less than satisfied
with the southern status quo. Many late-nineteenth-century evangelicals were
concerned about growing economic inequalities and the partisan nature of
politics; others were alarmed by the influence of the “whisky ring” on
politics, while still others worried about the growing Roman Catholic “menace.”
Together, these dangers indicated a general drift in the land towards tyranny.
These sinister forces threatened to move America away from her millennial
course, and evangelicals believed that they had a responsibility, through
political involvement, to keep America on her democratic and Christian path.

From
these anxieties emerged the Farmers’ Alliance, the most powerful farmers’ union
in the nation’s history, which in turn begat the People’s Party. Blasting into North Carolina from Texas in 1887, the Alliance drew on Protestant evangelicalism for its
basic intellectual orientation, its moral fervor, and, most importantly, its
apocalyptic fears that greedy, unscrupulous plutocrats had adulterated God’s
New Israel. The Alliance began as a non-partisan movement, although most
members in North Carolina were Democrats. Originally, the Alliance cooperated
with the Democratic Party in North Carolina, but by 1892 many if not most North
Carolina Alliancefolk had grown disaffected, believing the Democratic Party had
succumbed to the diabolical forces of tyranny. In evangelical Alliancefolks’
minds, just as an ecclesiastical body might forsake the ideals of Christianity,
so might political parties and institutions forsake the true ideals or
“principles” of political economy, and for the Populists, that is just what the
old parties had done. Hence, with righteous indignation, North Carolina
Alliancefolk likened themselves to Protestant reformers and the patriots in
1776 and formed a third party, the North Carolina People’s Party.

The
Alliancefolk did not just mimeograph evangelical ideals. Within the Alliance,
evangelical patterns of thought and Jeffersonian yeoman ideals merged into a
uniquely evangelical and rural reform agenda involving progressive farming,
economic cooperation, religious or moral reform, and political action. What for
many evangelicals had been somewhat vague notions of political action took
crystalline form within the Alliance as a program of economic and political
cooperation. In the process, the lines between the Alliance and Christianity,
between farmers and Christians, and between Jesus and Thomas Jefferson,
blurred. Jesus became a radical agrarian reformer and his circle of disciples a
Galilean sub-alliance, while the Democratic and Republican Parties became the
Pharisees and Sadducees in league with the money changers (monopolists) in the
temple. One preacher and Alliance advocate went so far as to label the Alliance
“Christianity in concentrated form,” while others believed it was the salve
provided by God to heal the church of tyrannical “churchianity”—a hollow institutional
shell, devoid of Christ’s principles and devoted only to self-preservation (Progressive Farmer, 4 November 1890).

By
casting the economic and political situation in terms of centralization and
especially “tyranny,” Populist leaders like W.R. Lindsey (the first state
chairman of the North Carolina People’s Party and a deeply evangelical lay
leader who denounced the Democrats as satanic and “Popish”) tapped into values
beyond the ethereal laws of political economy. Centralization in the broader
political economy had a trickle-down effect on personal liberty and
independence. Economic centralization robbed farmers not only of fair
compensation but more insidiously of their freedom to earn a living and hence
their personal independence as they became enslaved to non-producers. Moreover,
not only were individual producers enslaved, but because present and future
generations would not benefit from economic independence, the entire system of
democracy was exposed to decay from within. The decay inevitably would spread
back into the political realm, as emasculated, spineless dupes and slaves led
by political partisans would fail to vote according to a God-breathed
conscience and hence halt God’s governance of the nation.

Again,
these assertions were part of a larger frame in which an eschatological battle
between organizational tyranny and individual liberty. Populists argued that
individual freedom, no matter where it existed, was constantly threatened by
the Satanic forces of institutional centralization. As the President of the Alliance put it: freedom, “. . . like the manna that fell from heaven, because it is
perishable, must be contended for every day” (News and Observer,
17 September 1895). Importantly, contending for this manna required a new
institution, since the fault in old parties (or the ecclesiastical institutions
Populists likewise attacked) was not bad “governing principles” but the
multiple failures of their leaders to embody those principles. Reform therefore
required a new party, made up of committed, disciplined members who embodied
the principles of freedom necessary to bring the nation’s political economy
back under God’s governance.

Populism’s
critics, drawing on conservative views of church and state, were unable or
unwilling to make this distinction between eternal principle and temporal
institution. They cast the institutional church or their political parties
themselves as the basis and defender of peace, civilization, the “powers that
be,” and ultimately the status quo; Populism therefore threatened all things
sacred in the southern order. One Populist critic announced, for example, that
a Populist “turns his back on his Bible and sneers at the churches,” while
pushing the South down “the road to anarchy” (Caucasian,
21 November 1895).

Populists,
however, believed—in commonsense fashion—that implementing God’s axioms was the
only way to secure harmony in the political economy, and therefore placed their
principles above party fealty. In doing so, they imagined themselves as heirs
to the other great Christian reformers or restorationists who had placed
principle over party or ecclesiastical body in order to assure eschatological
victory. In that context, State Alliance President and Populist office holder
Cyrus Thompson called on the church to follow John the Baptist who “. . .
inspired His prophets to meddle with politics and to say that national evils
were consequent upon national sins” and Jesus who “was himself the model of
indignant rebuke of sin in high places.” Thompson had witnessed such activity
in the Alliance, which, for him, had come “together on grounds of purest
patriotism and Christianity” (Caucasian, 6 February 1896).

With
such ideas shaping their self-conception, it is easy to see why Populists leapt
into the political fray with such devotion. Perhaps, in fact, the more
difficult question is why voting in the early twentieth century these
evangelicals did indeed become more passive about political involvement or
even. Certainly southern Democrats’ successful use of white supremacy to
destroy the Populists and disfranchise blacks played a critical role, as the
ultimate result of these campaigns was a devastating drop in voter registration
among both blacks and whites. Why vote, Populists might have asked, if one’s apocalyptic
forebodings actually came to pass—if the Devil won?

It
is then correct to assume that the emergence of the Religious Right in the
mid-twentieth century marked a shift in religious and political thinking in the
South, but only if one’s point of comparison is the first half of the twentieth
century rather than the last half of the nineteenth. One might even argue that
the Religious Right marked a recovery of older nineteenth-century patterns of
mixing religion and politics in America. Such a statement, however, needs
qualification, for the political activism of Populists differed in significant
ways from the twentieth-century’s Religious Right. Whereas political and
religious commitments were of a single cloth in the nineteenth century—commitment
to American democratic values and processes equaled one’s commitment to Jesus
since both derived from God-given, axiomatic truth—the twentieth-century
Religious Right has seemed content using American systems of governance to
address, recover, or restore particular religious values without necessarily
preserving or restoring those political processes themselves. For the
Populists, however, America’s political process was a sacred entity worth
fighting for or preserving.

In a more general sense, the Populists’
mixture of religion and politics suggests that we continue to reckon with the
ability of conservative religion to stimulate movements that challenge the
status quo. As sociologist Christian Smith has argued so effectively,
especially where it is central to or legitimates a predominant culture,
religion can shape the social and political agenda of movements offering a
radical, although often complex critique of that very culture. Populists’
religious convictions had an inner cultural logic that drew on ideological,
social, and religious traditions foundational to their understanding of what it
meant to be Christian and American. For Populists, a political and economic
reform program fused with evangelical hopes of eternal life in the arms of
Jesus and the establishment of the millennium. This produced a movement
baptized in a religious fervor matching the ultimate, eschatological certainty
and seriousness of the ideals and hopes that propelled it. Populist editor J.F.
Click epitomized this sense of ultimate concern. For Click, the failure to
enact Populist measures, in this case monetary reform, would mean “abject
slavery to your children and their posterity. It means damnation to your
children whom you have tried to teach to reverence God as the great Ruler of
the Universe. When your children realize that this claims to be a Christian
nation and that the religion of the Lord Jesus reigns, they will be loath to
accept such Christianity and such religion that underlies a government that has
no humanity in it, and that would oppress the poor, those
Christ...wanted...free from want and misery which is brought upon them by
uncivil, immoral and unjust laws, instigated at all times by the devil
himself.” For Click, monetary or economic reform was “not only a political
question, but…a great moral principle that is too vital to be trifled with”—one
for which his contemporaries would be held “morally responsible to God and
man.” Click warned that, “unless they repent, hell will be full of editors,
politicians and even professed Christians for the ignorant and reckless manner
in which they have exercised the rights delegated to them by God Himself, in
the way of giving the people just and civil laws” (Hickory Mercury, 6 April 1898).

Joe Creech is
lecturer in history and humanities in Christ College at Valparaiso University. His book Righteous Indignation:
Religion and the Populist Revolution in North Carolina will be published in 2006.

Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and
American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Mathews,
Donald. “‘Christianizing the South’—Sketching a Synthesis.” In New Directions in American
Religious History, edited by Harry Stout and D.G. Hart, 84-115. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

–––. “and ‘We have left undone those
things which we ought to have done.’” Church History, 67 (1998),
305-325. McMath, Robert. Populist Vanguard. New York: Norton, 1977.